Alan Werritty

University of Dundee · Division of Geography

Measuring the amount of water in the air has been one of the most challenging of routine tasks in meteorology. From the 1650s onwards the methods involved either the uptake of moisture by organic materials such as human hair and whalebone (hygrometry) or the measurement of cooling due to loss of latent heat during evaporation (psychrometry). In 179...

The original version of the book was inadvertently published with error in “Neogene/Early Pleistocene fluvial gravels”, and this has been corrected as “Palaeogene fluvial gravels” in Page “487” of Chapter “29”. The correction chapter and the book have been updated with change.

This paper aims to analyse evidence, based on one of the largest and most representative samples of households previously flooded or living with flood risk to date, of social patterns in a range of flood resilience traits relating to preparedness prior to a flood (e.g., property adaptations, contents insurance, etc.) and mitigations enacted during...

The Spey drainage basin incorporates a classic assemblage of fluvial landforms recording both their evolution during the Lateglacial and Holocene and the operation of present-day fluvial processes. Noteworthy examples of relict and active alluvial fans occur alongside major sequences of river terraces. Although most reaches of wandering gravel-bed...

Geomorphological features and processes contribute significantly to the geodiversity and geoheritage of Scotland. Key sites identified through the Geological Conservation Review are mostly protected as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. These sites represent the variety of geological, glacial, periglacial, fluvial, coastal, mass-movement and kar...

Natural flood management (NFM) techniques attract much interest in flood risk management science, not least because their effectiveness remains subject to considerable uncertainty, particularly at larger catchment and event scales. This derives from a paucity of empirical studies which can offer either longitudinal or comparison data sets in which...

The COP-26 United Nations Climate Change meeting, scheduled to be held in Glasgow in 2021, is an important step in the world’s attempt to deal with the climate emergency arising from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Here we look at how society has responded to the Covid-19 emergency and compare it with the response to the climate change emergen...

This paper finds that social differentiation in flood impacts is relatively small soon after a flood, with some surprising results such as professionals and homeowners badly affected in the short‐term – but widens over time, with socially disadvantaged groups displaying less recovery. The paper concludes that vulnerability and resilience to floodin...

Quaternary deposits and landforms are an integral component of Scotland's geodiversity and natural heritage with intrinsic, scientific, educational, cultural, aesthetic and ecological values. Their conservation is founded on the assessment and safeguard of key protected areas principally for their scientific values. The evaluation of site networks...

Advances in Scottish Quaternary Studies: Preface - Volume 110 Issue 1-2 - John E. GORDON, Alan WERRITTY

This study investigated contributory factors to flood hazard around Scotland. There is a need to develop preliminary assessments of areas potentially vulnerable to flooding for compliance with the European Union Directive on the Assessment and Management of Flood Risks (2007/60/EC). Historical accounts of coastal flood events in Scotland, notably i...

This paper reviews the key evidence for global climate change and outlines the trends of climate change in Scotland, the potential impacts and the implications for policy makers. Human activity is causing a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations and there is little doubt that this is contributing to global warming. There is greater uncertainty abou...

Land use and the management of our natural resources such as soils and water offer great opportunities to sequester carbon and mitigate the effects of climate change. Actions on forestry, soil carbon and damaged peatlands each have the potential to reduce Scottish emissions in 2020 by hundreds of thousands of tonnes. Most actions to reduce emission...

In view of the challenge posed by climate change and the need to reduce dependence on fossil fuels, The Royal Society of Edinburgh Inquiry (2011) examined the barriers making it difficult for Scotland to change to a low-carbon society. The single most important finding is that, whilst widely desired, change is held back by the lack of coherence and...

Risk analysis and appraisal of the benefits of structural flood risk management measures such as embankments is well established. Here, a method to quantify, over extended timescales, the effectiveness of non-structural measures such as land use spatial planning, insurance and flood resilient construction is presented. The integrated approach coupl...

D'Arcy Thompson (1960–1948) was one of the most celebrated biologists of his day, best known for his On Growth and Form (1917) which was the first successful biophysical explanation of the size and shape of organisms. In particular, his concept of allometric growth and theory of transformations have informed cutting edge research in biometrics and...

The 'place' of Geography in Higher Education Institutions reflects the outcome of a range of social practices that in some locations have enabled the discipline to grow and prosper and elsewhere have forced it to struggle and even disappear. It is argued that local practices are of particular importance, but are often ignored in the history of Geog...

The sustainable management of river corridors requires an understanding of the linkages between geomorphic, hydrologic, ecologic and socio-economic factors across a hierarchy of spatial and temporal scales. Therefore, in order to be genuinely sustainable, management must ideally be set within a catchment/watershed context. However, in practice, thi...

Synopsis On 18 August 2004 an intense rainstorm generated 31 debris flows in Glen Ogle, Stirlingshire. Two channelized debris flows traversed the A85 trunk road trapping 20 vehicles and resulting in the helicopter airlift rescue of 57 motorists and passengers. The failure zone of the largest of these debris flows occurred within a shallow hillslope...

Unconfined reaches of the River Feshie in the Cairngorm Mountains have active low-sinuosity moderately divided patterns in which glacial outwash gravel is reworked by floods of up to 100 m3 sec−1 on a gradient of 0·009. Alternate bars of diagonal or lateral form are characteristic; they may develop from lobate or elongate medial bars, and advance e...

A high-magnitude rainstorm on 18 August 2004 triggered approximately 30 debris flow landslides in Glen Ogle, Scotland. Two of these debris flows traversed the A85 trunk road, trapping several vehicles and resulting in the airlift rescue of 57 people. The location of the initiating failure of the larger of the two debris flows was determined by the...

On 3 August 1829, north-east Scotland recorded one of the most severe catastrophic floods in modern UK history. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's An account of the great floods of August 1829 in the province of Moray and adjoining districts (1830) provides a detailed eyewitness account that can be used to reconstruct the flood. This paper reconstructs the h...

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Proxy flood records from sediment stacks in floodplain palaeochannels provide an opportunity to extend short instrumental records and thus improve current estimates of flood risk. The ‘Bloody Inches’ (a meander cutoff on the lower River Tay, Scotland) has been infilling with flood deposits since c. 1761. Agricultural flood embankments locally breac...

The existing paradigm of UK flood risk management that privileges structural solutions over non-structural ones is evolving in response to threats posed by climate change and higher environmental standards required by the EC Water Framework Directive. This paper examines the contrasting reactions of DEFRA and the Scottish Executive. The Scottish ‘e...

Improved estimates of UK flood risk during a period of increased climatic variability place challenges on existing methods that rely on short instrumental records. This paper examines the value of using historical data (both documentary and epigraphic) to augment existing gauged records for the River Tay at Perth as part of a multi-method approach...

The alluvial fan that has developed at the confluence of the Rivers Feshie and Spey over the past 13,000 years provides an exceptional example of an unstable, gravel-bed river in the Scottish Highlands protected under UK and EU environmental law. River engineering extending back to the early 19th century has only registered a modest impact on this...

On August 3rd 1829 north-east Scotland recorded the most severe catastrophic flood in modern UK history. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder’s "An account of the great floods of August 1829 in the province of Moray and adjoining districts" (1830) provides a detailed eyewitness account of this event, which can used to reconstruct the flood. The flood was generat...

New predictive methodologies are needed to support sustainable catchment management, particularly in poorly gauged or ungauged basins. The CHASM research programme has been established to gain new understanding of the hydrological and ecological functioning of mesoscale catchments (10 2 –10 3 km 2) and of how catchment response changes with scale,...

Hydrology in Scotland has emerged as a diverse and maturing discipline in recent years following its origins in engineering and the environmental sciences. Despite significant progress in understanding the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the hydrological cycle in Scotland, hydrologists face a number of significant challenges. These inc...

The recent increased variability of Scotland's hydroclimate poses major problems for water resource managers charged with making informed investment decisions given the likely impact of future climate change. Two strategies are developed in this paper to assist managers faced with this environmental uncertainty. The first involves trend analysis of...

The physical background to hydrology in Scotland is briefly reviewed. The main scientific events associated with understanding the science of hydrology in Scotland are summarized and major contemporary research themes are outlined. A brief overview of each paper in the current volume is given.

An edited version of this paper was published by AGU. Copyright (2002) American Geophysical Union. Tracer pebbles are widely used to learn about gravel transport along rivers. Movement over short times and distances is dominated by factors controlling entrainment: relative particle size and shear stress. Movement at longer scales also involves depo...

The identification of a reliable flood return frequency is difficult and an established problem in hydrology. The Flood Estimation Handbook (Robson & Reed, 1999) states that the two primary methods for obtaining estimates for short river-gauging records are (a) through the use of historical data augmentation and (b) pooled data analysis. Analysis o...

Sedimentary evidence of past floods can be preserved in flood plain sediment sinks during overbank flood events. The potential for using such flood plain sediments to reconstruct long-term flooding histories was explored in the lower reaches of the River Tay in Scotland. Granulometric analysis and radionuclide dating undertaken on cores from an emb...

Rivers in humid zones are delicately adjusted, within narrow limits, to evacuate the water and sediment supplied from upstream without significant changes in channel type and the morphology of the valley floor. Prevailing climate and land use are the major controls determining the nature of that adjustment. Significant environmental change (either...

ER Mapper™, an image processing system, was used to manipulate scanned maps, plans and aerial photographs to enable detailed analysis of historical river channel planform change. The ER Mapper™ package offers the opportunity to spatially reference each item of planform data into the same scale and co-ordinate space as a base map, using a warping al...

Increased hydroclimatic variability in recent years and the resultant flooding raise questions concerning flood risk estimation from short flow records in Scotland. Long peak flow series have been simulated using historical rainfall to reassess flood risk estimates for 11 selected rivers. Changes of >10% in the estimated value of the 100-year flood...

Reach-scale sediment storage is rarely quantified in sediment budget studies, yet it has a considerable effect on the sediment delivery ratio at the basin scale, and on the accuracy of morphological methods of bedload estimation at the reach scale. Deployment of magnetic tracer particles allows accurate characterisation of sediment fluxes in gravel...

The seasonality of river flooding in North Britain displays considerable spatial variation. This paper identifies the geographical patterns of flood seasonality, using a database of events exceeding modest flood-flow thresholds at each of 156 gauging stations, and seeks to explain them in terms of climatological and catchment characteristics. Flood...

Scottish rivers afford a richer variety of process, form and pattern than other UK rivers because of the greater diversity of environments within which they have evolved. This arises because of deeply dissected relief (particularly to be found in the Scottish Highlands), the juxtaposition of reaches from highland, upland and lowland environments, a...

Doubts have been expressed about the ability of either abrasion or sorting to explain strong downstream fining of river gravels. We describe pronounced fining over a short distance in a Scottish river that has no human disturbance or lateral input of water and sediment. Measured abrasion rates are far too small to explain observed downstream fining...

Bed load was trapped during flood events over a 20-month period at the lower end of the Allt Dubhaig, a small river in Scotland with rapid downstream fining of gravel bed material on a slowly aggrading concave long profile. The channel bed near the trap is predominantly gravel with a secondary sand mode. Total transport in each event depended mainl...

The sediment budget of the Arbucies drainage basin is based on the description and quantification of several geomorphological processes: 1) sediment yield, 2) soil transfer from the hillslopes, 3) secondary sediment sources, which include dissolved salts contained in precipitation, and human-induced contributions, and 4) residence time of sandy-gra...

The eastern Grampian Mountains are considered here as the highland areas to the east of the Tay-Tummel-Truim-Spey through valley (Figure 91). This valley separates the western mountain areas, characterized by intense glacial erosion, and the eastern mountain plateau country, where glacial erosion has produced only specific features superimposed on...

The commonly termed Central Lowlands of Scotland (Figure 16.1) do in fact contain a number of hill groups reaching over 600 m OD. The term, therefore, is somewhat inexact but it is useful in highlighting the contrast between the Midland Valley and the mountainous areas to both the north and south. As both these mountain areas were major sources of...

The area termed the south-west Highlands in this chapter extends south of the Great Glen to the Highland boundary and from the central Grampians to the west coast, including the Kintyre peninsula (Figure 10.1). As elsewhere, there is a considerable range of environments in this region, which is reflected in its Quaternary history. Deposits older th...

The Inverness area comprises the lowlands along the Moray Firth coast from the Dornoch Firth to east of Nairn, the upland areas of the hinterland and the glaciated valleys extending to the west and south-west, including the Great Glen (Figure 7.1). The principal focus of research on this area has centred on the evidence for the last ice-sheet, the...

Mean solute loadings for precipitation and runoff at three instrumented sub-catchments at Loch Dee in Southwest Scotland have been determined for several years in the early 1980s. Inputs are dominated by sodium, chloride and sulphate, and the same three species, together with silica, dominate the outputs from all three sub-catchments. The sub-catch...

On the 4th August 1978, a major flash flood occurred on the Allt Mor, a mountain torrent within the Cairngorm massif, Scotland. This paper assesses the flood's immediate geomorphic impact as well as its longer term geomorphic significance in terms of slope and valley-floor development. The hydrometeorological characteristics of the flood are recons...

The log-logistic (LLG) distribution is evaluated for flood frequency analysis. Some of its properties and methods of parameter estimation are given, including a new method based on generalised least squares (GLS). The performance of the log-logistic distribution is compared with those of the generalised extreme value (GEV), three parameter log-norm...

The index flood/regional growth curve method is the most commonly used procedure for estimating a design flood at an ungauged site in the United Kingdom when only the instantaneous peak discharge is required. This paper summarises recent work in Scotland in which the authors have refined the equations for estimating the index flood from the physica...

As part of the IBG's initiative on the current status of geography, the 17 IBG Study Groups were asked to prepare a document concerning the research of their members, and the authors have been attempting to synthesise these documents.This paper is concerned with the major research foci identified from Study Group submissions. Seven foci are identif...

Examines the incidence and significance of floods in Scotland, distinguishing between flooding as a purely physical phenomenon and flooding as an environmental hazard. Some floods are purely natural phenomena, but the flood hazard is substantially man-made. -G.M.Sheail

Maps and photo sources have problems and restrict investigation to little more than a century. In this article the behaviour of the strongly braided River Feshie (Cairngorms, Scotland) is examined for periods from 1-200 yr. It is braided in three reaches - elsewhere the channel is restrained by rock or terraces. Changes over 50-100 yr are difficult...

Various methods of classifying stream networks are examined in terms of their attendant information losses. Grouping networks according to their mean source height scores well in this respect because it retains a considerable amount of the original topologic detail present in each individual topologically distinct channel network. Stream set values...

The lengths of >100 exterior links for three catchments in Devon and Somerset in southwest England were obtained by field survey. These link lengths were compared with data obtained from the provisional edition of the 1:25,000 map series and the Old County map series at 1:2500. The degree of correspondence with the 1:25,000 series was very poor, bu...

Highlights This site is selected for an excellent example of the glacial diversion of drainage. The present route of the River Clyde occupies a bedrock gorge which was cut following the infilling of its former course by glacial deposits.

This report assesses how many people in urban areas are at risk from pluvial flooding (surface water flooding resulting from intense rainfall). It projects the increase in risk due to climate change and population growth, examines the exposure of vulnerable social groups, and reviews the main policy developments to manage surface water. Flooding an...

Highlights The landforms and deposits at Glen Feshie include outwash and river terraces, alluvial fans, palaeochannels and debris cones. This assemblage of features provides an outstanding record of valley-floor and valley-slope development during the Lateglacial and Holocene.

Three years' observations on a short reach of Dorback Burn, Cairngorm, Scotland demonstrate great complexity in the pattern of channel adjustments to flow regime in gravel-bed rivers. The paper examines the scale and pattern of channel adjustment, the geomorphic significance of flash floods in such rivers, and the pattern of recovery following a fl...

Assessing the frequency of recent large floods in Scotland is hindered by short river records and non-homogenous flow series. Proxy flood records can be generated from sediment stacks in floodplain palaeochannels which steadily infill with silts during normal winter floods and fine sand during catastrophic floods. The ‘Bloody Inches’ (a meander cut...